Date: Thu, 23 May 1996 09:15:09 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: MARXIST METHOD & RACE


It often happens among people I know that when one reflects on the
history of the socialist movement and its behavior concerning
racial and gender issues, the implications of the criticism always
point to the imputed inadequacy of Marxism.  Yet many of us have
an intuitive understanding of Marxism to know that this is not so.
The issue is not just the specific theoretical  articulation of
the relations between class and race or class and gender or
amongst all three and more, but of the general method of Marxist
analysis, how it abstracts from social phenomena to reconstruct a
picture of the concrete world.

Historically, the critique from within Marxism itself has dealt
with the general vulgarization of Marxist theory caused by
economism, workerism, empiricism, opportunism, etc. and the
implications for understanding political economy, political
struggle, etc. regarding the working class as a generality.
Obviously, people like Korsch, Lukacs, Gramsci, Mattick, Marcuse,
etc., and more recently people like Derek Sayer or Moishe Postone
fit into this critical heritage.

Now I know some people who are seeking the same sort of
theoretical perspective applied to the race question.  Some have
looked at the organized left and how it has articulated these
issues.  The issue has been pursued from another angle, from the
perspective of black radicalism relating to the left rather than
the left relating to the black struggle, and from this angle one
must deal historically with Du Bois, Hubert Harrison, the African
Blood Brotherhood, A. Philip Randolph, Richard Wright, the Black
Panthers, etc. etc.  But the issue goes beyond this to the heart
of Marxist method itself, to the issues one raises by invoking
Korsch, for example.  I am not aware that Korsch, Mattick, or any
of the others ever turned their theoretical method to the analysis
of race.  If I have missed something, please tell me.  In fact, I
can't really think of anyone who has brought these two separate
streams together -- Marxist method in general and the issue of
race and class (or class and sex) in particular.  The people who
write about Marxist method deal with generalities -- dialectics,
value theory, etc. -- but not with the concrete working class
differentiated ethnically, racially, sexually, etc.  Am I wrong?
Please fill in the gaps of my knowledge.

It is obviously a vital practical political necessity as well as
an intellectual necessity to grapple with this problem.  That is
why I initially recommended such texts as Sayer's THE VIOLENCE OF
ABSTRACTION.  C.L.R. James combines those two separate streams and
that is why James is such a pioneer theoretically as well as in
other ways.  (This applies to varying degrees to others in his
circle, notably Raya Dunayevskaya, who developed her own
philosophy of revolution in the 1950s and after.)

So I need to know if there is literature that not just articulates
the relationships among class, sex, race, etc., (e.g. Oliver Cox
on the race-class issue), which I imagine would be significant by
now though I have read practically none of it, but more
importantly literature that relates these issues to the Marxist
method in general.  That is really the key issue now for many
reasons and purposes, amongst them the complementary need to
combat nationalist and postmodern obscurantism (essentialism and
anti-essentialism -- also complementary petty bourgeois strains of
thought) on one hand, and to de-provincialize the Marxist
intellectual milieu on the other.

Incidentally, Marxist method as well as other prejudices also
figure into the socialist movement's inadequate dealings with the
black and woman questions.  I don't mean just the economism and
bureaucratism of the Communist Party, and not even just the
framing of the black question as a national question.  I'm
thinking very much of the sordid history of Trotskyism, which
basically continues Stalin's notion of nationality and whose
entire history in dealing with the black question is in terms of
the complementary poles of black nationalism vs. revolutionary
integrationism, both schematic abstractions and utterly bankrupt
as is Trotskyism as a whole.  The fact that almost all of the
Trotskyists lie about James in pursuing their agendas is very
telling.  Of course the white left is full of shit anyway, but
here I am concerned with fundamental questions of the Marxist
method of abstraction in application to the concrete world, which
is the social problem elevated to the level of abstract
cognition.


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